The present invention relates generally to communications in cellular networks, and more particularly, to resource management with device-device communication in next generation cellular networks.
Device-to-device (D2D) communications is being pursued as an important feature in next generation wireless networks (LTE-direct, WiFi-direct). Being an underlay to conventional infrastructure wireless networks, the goal of D2D is to leverage the physical proximity of communicating devices to improve wireless coverage in sparse deployments, provide connectivity for public safety services and improve resource utilization in conventional deployments. However. D2D's ability to improve resource utilization has not been well addressed and there are no solutions for managing wireless spectral resources efficiently between conventional users (users communicating with base stations) and D2D users (users communicating amongst themselves), and also for leveraging the offloading capability of D2D communications.
Current solutions for D2D do not account for multi-cell, sectored nature of wireless cellular networks and hence have not considered D2D in the presence of conventional FFR (fractional frequency solutions) solutions that are typically considered for resource management in cellular networks. Also, they assume a lot of channel state information between client devices in addition to that with respect to the base stations, thereby posing a scalability issue.
Accordingly, there is a need for resource management with device-device communication in next generation cellular networks.